Category: Expert Advice

If you’re traveling abroad this summer what are your key priorities? Passport? Check. Suitcases crammed full of your finest shorts and vests? Check and check. How about safety equipment and items that could be the difference between survival or not? Yeah, didn’t think so.
Often it’s overlooked by many of us, but having essential safety equipment stowed away in your luggage is a vital component to having a stress free and safe vacation. Can you imagine being stuck in a remote location after a day of rock climbing, suffering a wound and not having a first aid kit to patch you up until help arrives? In some cases that could be the difference.
What about emergency services? Do you know the correct numbers to call in a foreign land? 999 isn’t universal. Quickly, it becomes apparent that personal safety is often neglected when it comes to preparing for a vacation, but fortunately, Mike’s Gear Reviews are on hand to give you the correct information you need to enjoy a safe and sound trip abroad. Read on and discover the essential bits of information for surviving in a foreign country!. Continue reading “Survival Strategies to Stay Safe While Traveling Abroad | Infographic”

When it all goes to shit, the corpses will be everywhere. No, not the zombies, but the dead. The regular dead. The bodies of people who didn’t make it. You think I’m kidding? Take a look on the news about what happens to regions after a natural disaster hits. In places without a unified emergency services, the corpses just lie around decomposing until volunteers and citizens can get to burying them. Post-Apocalypse, there won’t be emergency services, or groups of volunteers, and citizens are going to be too busy fleeing for their lives to dig out the corpses and lay them to rest.

Initally, you’ll be among those fleeing citizens, and that’s fine. But when you start settling down, building your community, you are going to need to do something about all those corpses lying around. Why? Two reasons – 1. Health, 2. Morale.

Lets get down to the nitty-gritty here. Not wanting to be indelicate, but a decomposing corpse is a health hazard. Bacteria, rot, rats, to mention only the most obvious. Several hundred or thousand corpses are worse. You don’t want to do all the dreadful things needed in order to survive just to end up dying because you didn’t clear out the houses, do you? Plus, the knowledge that all those dead people are there, behind their locked doors, just rotting into oblivion, is bound to be too much for some of your community.

So what do you do? In Stephen King’s The Stand, the survivors who massed in Boulder set up a house-clearing team, who went from house to house, removing corpses and planting them in a mass grave. It sounds harsh and cold, but it’s a good idea. You don’t have time to bury everyone individually, and while a funeral pyre seems like a nice idea you probably have more important things to do with the wood.

Make sure your burial pit is well outside of town, far enough that your farmers won’t accidentally dig into it in ten or twenty years. Set your team up – ensure they all wear masks and protective suits – and have them go from house to house, clearing out the bodies. If you have any religious leaders in your compound, this is a good time to have them bless the pit. You can’t have them buried individually, but such a guesture will make you look good and make the more faith-inclined among you more comfortable with the idea.

Plague pit sign, council estate, Pitfield St, Hackney, London, UK (Photo credit: gruntzooki)
If you feel guilty, remember it’s a perfectly legitimate choice. During the Black Death, the victims were interred in Plague Pits. These places are now remembered by stone markers. The survivors of the plague- an apocalyptic event if there ever was one, in which around 60% of the population of Europe died – didn’t have time to find out the names of the dead or give them a proper burial, and neither do you.

It’s best to do this task sooner rather than later, especially if the apocalypse happens in the warmer months. It should be one of the first thigns you do, in fact, just after building your barriacdes and setting up your government. The volunteers who do the task should be well rewarded, with extra rations or luxury goods. When all the dead have been removed, and the pit has been filled, apply some consideration to the feelings of your people and put some kind of memorial there. Maybe plant a tree, or some flowers. It’ll grow good and strong.

In 500 years, when it’s all long gone and a new society has arisen, the archaeologists of the future will find your mass grave and make assumptions based on it. Here is a good chance to put an explanation in with the corpses, if you care about that sort of thing.

In the past, I have made a big deal about how in the post apocalypse, I WILL be a benevolent dictator in control of a large, well run compound. Some of you seem to seem to think I might be joking about this.
Oh, no, sugarbuns. I fully intend to be a dictator. I’m already spoiled, petty and quick to anger – dictatorship should be a cinch.
I can’t tell you HOW to build your compound – it requires a combination of charm, talent, leadership abilities, organisation and a basic, borderline sociopathic disrespect for the rights, opinions and feelings of other people that I just don;t think you can learn. But, I can give you some ideas about how to maintain your iron control once you have it. After all, you don’t want to screw up so bad they murder you, do you?

Studying a humanities degree adds almost nothing to your post apocalyptic survival chances. An appreciation of poetry, understanding dissent in terms of music or achitecture, or plans to take it into English later on, do absolutely nothing to defend you against psychotic robots. Also not great, is the way that studying as an adult student takes away time and resources from obsessive planning. £700 of money that could have gone to buying a gasmask and filters spent on furthering my education! 15 hours a week that could be spent on practicing how to get out of the house quick gone on learning about Pugin!
However, I am a big believer that nearly ANYTHING can be manipulated into working for you post apocalypse (yes, even you, you socially-awkward, self-righteous neckbeard; post apocalypse you may actually be as important as you pretend you are!)
It’s just knowing how to swing it.Continue reading “Nothing is useless (except learning Klingon)”

The only thing worse than having a boring job is having a boring job that involves relaying boring information to people who have no interest in your latest report about whatever you’ve been on about in that sad little corner of yours. The CDC is the kid with the rock collection on show-and-tell day. Sure there’s loads of facts and “interesting” things you can learn about hand washing, but NASA went to the moon.
Well, the CDC is taking the gloves off (then carefully washing their hands up to their elbows for 45 seconds) and bring out the pop culture references. They realized that zombies are hot right now and hell if that mess isn’t right up their alley.
Infection, plague, contagions, and wide-spread chaos? Jackpot!Continue reading “Why The CDC is My Favorite Government Agency”

What if, instead of preparing for corporations, scientists, and politicians eventually tucking us all soundly into our collective hand basket before propelling us to eternal damnation we prepared to pave our way down an alternate path? What if we forced the issue of going green by making it easy to understand, afford, and navigate?
One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) is here to help us explore our proactive, preemptive options. Basically, as explained on their website, “1BOG is collective purchasing for green home improvements. By grouping together, we can get huge discounts on things that are typically very expensive.”Continue reading “One Block Off The Grid Explains What It Would Take To Live Off The Land”

What if, instead of preparing for corporations, scientists, and politicians eventually tucking us all soundly into our collective hand basket before propelling us to eternal damnation we prepared to pave our way down an alternate path? What if we forced the issue of going green by making it easy to understand, afford, and navigate?
One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) is here to help us explore our proactive, preemptive options. Basically, as explained on their website, “1BOG is collective purchasing for green home improvements. By grouping together, we can get huge discounts on things that are typically very expensive.”Continue reading “One Block Off The Grid Explains What It Would Take To Live Off The Land”